1 - The PIMS project: vision, achievements, and scope of the data

Summary

The Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy (PIMS) project, which began in 1972, was one of the most successful and influential partnerships between marketing academics and the private sector. Robert Buzzell, as Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute, was one of a small group of people who made the PIMS project possible. The program resulted in a unique dataset used to investigate the links among marketing strategy, market structure, and performance. The Marketing Science Institute was a near-perfect organizational platform from which to launch a project that had the ambitious goal of understanding how and why some marketing strategies were more profitable than others. To enable this investigation, PIMS, from the beginning, set a new standard of depth and breadth for panel data collected from operating business units. In this book we have collected a set of original essays that revisit the ideals of the PIMS project. Our purpose is to explore what we learned and, perhaps, what we should or still might learn about researching the connections between marketing strategy and profits.

This does not mean that we are finished with the questions that PIMS helped the field of marketing strategy pose. However, enough time has passed and enough additional evidence has been accumulated that we believe it is appropriate to appraise what was accomplished. Some of the essays will help put the achievement of PIMS into the context of the times (both then and now).